Hi guys, I've read through some of the Ubuntu Manual, and I must say it's looking very polished. You've done some really good work and I admire the energy that you've put into the project. I have a few issues with it, though.
The first is the lack of proper attribution. Sections of the manual are clearly lifted from the Ubuntu system documentation (CC-BY-SA 2.5 licensed) and the Community wiki (CC-BY-SA 3.0), but since this is a separate work, you need to provide a clear attribution to "Members of the Ubuntu Documentation Project" and "Contributors to the Ubuntu Community Documentation". There is also a restriction on CC-BY-SA 2.5 that all derivative works must be released under the same license, but I'm not sure if the Manual would count as a derivative. For an example of unattributed re-use, see "Does my scanner work with Ubuntu?", around page 113, and compare it with the "Does my scanner work with Ubuntu?" section of the system docs (Printing, faxing and scanning -> Scanning). The second is: Did you really have to fork so much of the existing documentation? Perfectly good documentation exists for almost everything in the manual: We have lots of stuff on Software Management, Security, the Desktop, working with common apps etc., plus a Command Line guide, within the currently shipping Ubuntu System Documentation (System -> Help and Support). It's all available online too, and we've been able to produce a single-document PDF from it before, albeit not a very attractive one. Wouldn't it have been more constructive to work on improving the existing material and making it more visible to users and easier to single-source into a combined document, than to re-do everything from scratch? We're now left in a position where there are two extremely similar community-maintained sets of documentation which differ just enough to make it necessary to maintain them separately. The community now has double the maintenance burden and double the translation burden, and I really think it was reckless to implement this project in the way that you did. In effect, you've created a competitor to the official system docs. I think that this will only serve to confuse users, who already have to contend with a fragmented Ubuntu "help ecosystem" as it is (system docs, wiki, third-party websites, IRC, mailing lists, LP Answers, etc.). Thanks, Phil -- Phil Bull https://launchpad.net/~philbull _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manual Post to : ubuntu-manual@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manual More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
